Legal And Operations Engineering Lead
perplexity
Híbrido
San Francisco
Engineering
Advertising
Job Score
100 pts
Hybrid model (+80)
Engineering (+10)
Advertising (+10)
Perplexity is looking for a dynamic and innovative contributor to join our team to help advance the business, improve the products we’re building, and revolutionize the way people search and interact with the internet. This unique role offers significant responsibility to apply and strengthen your technical background and combine your legal experience, and offers growth potential in other areas of an in-house practice group.
About the Opportunity
We seek a technical lead to join our legal operations team to drive infrastructure development across our legal and operations team and support our ambitious growth trajectory within our rapidly growing AI technology company. This unique role will report to the Legal Operations Manager and partner with the General Counsel and VP, Operations on strategic planning, architecting, delivering, and transforming high-volume legal workflows into scalable, automated systems. We're seeking a sharp, innovative technical operations professional with strong business judgment, practical problem-solving skills, and a deep understanding of high-growth startup environments. Ideally, this person also brings legal expertise alongside technical know-how. You’ll build scalable processes and establish foundational systems that will scale with our growth. Success requires someone who is inquisitive, has entrepreneurial drive, and the agility to thrive in our fast-paced environment while shaping our non-technical orgs from the ground up at a cutting-edge AI technology company.
About the Role
Responsibilities
Architect and build Perplexity's Legal and Operations Engineering platform — a coherent stack of agents, workflows, and evaluation infrastructure that replaces manual, high-volume legal work across commercial contracting, e-discovery, enterprise redlining, subsidiary governance, vendor onboarding, and litigation and matter management.
Own the enterprise contracting automation system end-to-end.
Ship the in-product legal surfaces built on Perplexity and Computer itself
Consolidate today's ad-hoc legal bots, prompts, and scripts into a documented, observable, and reusable platform with clear conventions for personas, tools, evals, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
Serve as the technical partner to the General Counsel. Translate complex, judgment-heavy legal workflows into engineered systems, and translate engineering constraints back to non-technical stakeholders.
Evaluate, retire, or replace third-party tools where a purpose-built internal system gives us a structural advantage.
Be the case study for forward-deployed engineering in non-engineering functions at Perplexity. Success here becomes the playbook for Legal, Recruiting, People, Workplace, and Operations.
What You’ll Bring
3+ years of backend software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at meaningful scale.
A working knowledge of legal concepts, with some experience in legal operations or paralegal work is desired.
Strong business judgment and practical problem-solving; comfortable making operational calls with incomplete information and calibrating risk in real time.
Track record building scalable processes and foundational systems from scratch, not maintaining a mature function.
Fluency with modern legal tech and AI tools; disciplined human-in-the-loop practices.
Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to work directly with senior legal, finance, and executive stakeholders.
Entrepreneurial drive, intellectual curiosity, and agility to thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.
Preferred Experience
Prior experience at an AI-native, SaaS, or consumer technology company operating at Perplexity’s pace.
Familiarity with e-billing platforms (e.g., Brightflag), matter management, CLM, and entity management systems.
Comfort with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and a builder mentality.
What did you think of this job?
Loading comments...
About Engineering
Software Engineering goes beyond traditional development, focusing on scalability, performance, and system architecture. Software engineers are responsible for designing infrastructures that support millions of simultaneous users.
Skills include microservices architecture, DevOps, cloud computing, application security, and performance optimization. Knowledge of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD is increasingly required.
Senior software engineers are rare and highly compensated professionals, with opportunities at major global tech companies.
About Advertising
The Advertising area is aimed at the planning, creation, and delivery of communication campaigns to promote brands, products, ideas, or services. Professionals in the sector work in advertising agencies or in-house marketing departments in creative fields (art direction, copywriting), strategic planning, account management, and media buying.
Discover Other Areas
Understand the scope of work, key skills, and tools used in different career areas.
About Public Relations
The Public Relations (PR) area focuses on managing the reputation, image, and communication of an organization with its various stakeholders (such as clients, investors, employees, media, and the community). PR professionals develop corporate communication strategies, manage media relations (press relations), organize institutional events, and work in image crisis prevention and management.
About IT Governance
IT Governance is the area responsible for ensuring that information technology resources are used strategically, efficiently, and in compliance with standards and regulations. IT governance professionals ensure that technology supports business objectives in a secure and reliable manner.
Key skills include IT service management (ITIL), IT audit and compliance, risk management, business continuity, disaster recovery, metrics and indicators (SLAs, KPIs), and strategic alignment between IT and business. Frameworks like COBIT, ITIL, ISO 27001, and compliance standards are essential.
IT Governance professionals in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master ITSM, IT audit, and risk management. The field offers opportunities from governance analyst to CIO/CTO, with a focus on efficiency, compliance, security, and business value.
About Product Owner
The Product Owner (PO) is the professional responsible for maximizing the value of the product delivered by the development team. They act as the voice of the customer and stakeholders, managing and prioritizing the product backlog, defining clear user stories, and ensuring the team works on the most valuable items for the business.
Key skills include backlog management, user story writing, prioritization (Mascow, RICE), agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), and stakeholder communication. Knowledge of tools like Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, and Miro is essential.
Product Owners are highly sought-after professionals in the technology market, working collaboratively with Scrum Masters, Product Managers, and engineering teams to drive agility and continuous value delivery.
About Cloud Solutions
The Cloud Solutions area is responsible for designing, implementing, and managing cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) for companies. Cloud professionals architect scalable, secure, and cost-optimized solutions, from data center migrations to serverless and multi-cloud architectures.
Key skills include IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions), managed databases (RDS, DynamoDB, BigQuery), cloud networking (VPC, CDN, load balancer), and security (IAM, WAF, KMS). Knowledge of FinOps, cloud governance, and AWS/Azure/GCP certifications is a differentiator.
Cloud Solutions professionals in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master multi-cloud architectures, FinOps, and can optimize costs while maintaining performance and security. The field offers opportunities from cloud engineer to cloud solutions architect, head of cloud, and chief cloud architect.
About Project Manager
The Project Manager is the professional responsible for planning, executing, and controlling projects end-to-end, ensuring they are delivered on time, within budget, and with the expected quality. With the growing complexity of businesses, project management professionals are fundamental to organizational success.
Key skills include planning and scheduling, scope, cost, risk, quality, and resource management, stakeholder communication, cross-functional team leadership, and use of agile and traditional methodologies. Certifications like PMP, PRINCE2, and Six Sigma are important differentiators.
Project Managers in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), tools like Jira and MS Project, and can deliver complex projects efficiently. The field offers opportunities from project analyst to head of PMO, with a focus on execution, governance, and business value.
Comments 0